Snow fun

When I pulled open the curtains this morning it was snowing. Not the sleety wet snow that we had here last Monday but proper white stuff that was already beginning to blanket my car parked in the courtyard below.

Normally I would be quite excited about a bit of snow - there is still a childhood pleasure in stomping about in it and throwing the odd snowball - but not on a day when you want to catch a flight.

I had a dreadful sense of foreboding.

I remembered Debrah saying that snow was also forecast for London, so logged onto the BBC to find the words weather, snow, chaos, travel and don't prominently displayed. Damn.

I spent the morning monitoring the situation on various websites, the best of which was the Stansted airport site which gave very real time information about each scheduled flight and it's status. From that I knew that Stansted was open but there were inevitable delays and the Carcassonne flight was still scheduled to leave at some point.

The Ryanair site continued to list the flight as 'ON TIME' well past the scheduled departure time - useless.

So the plane would get here late - well that's fair enough given the conditions and everybody would have accepted that if that was the extent of the problem. The problem was in fact at Carcassonne airport.

It snowed for two hours here and at least two inches fell in town very rapidly but it just as rapidly started to disappear when the sun emerged at lunchtime. When I went up to the airport the roads were clear. I tried to reassure myself that they would have gritted and snowploughed the runway and all would be well.

Some chance.

Carcassonne airport does not have any snow clearing facilities and presumably couldn't call for any help because the local ones were all busy elsewhere. A snowplough, a snowplough, my kingdom for a snowplough.

There was an awful lot of shoulder shrugging going on.

So the East Midlands flight - the first of the day - went to Perpignan. It appears that the only three available coaches were commandeered to take the passengers for that flight down there.

The Dublin flight also went to Perpignan but with no more coaches the return flight was cancelled.

The Stansted flight found its way to Beziers. It was inevitable that the return, my flight back to Stansted, was going to be cancelled. We all knew it was going to be cancelled but until it is officially cancelled one cannot book another flight without paying again.

So we waited and they made us wait until late afternoon before finally confirming what we all knew all along.

Resignedly, I made my way back to 42rvh and turned the heating on again and opened a couple of shutters to let a bit of light in. I managed to get myself on the Sunday flight, the Saturday one being already full with people trying to get back to Dublin - the nerve.

So instead of having a nice hot supper ready for Debrah when she gets home from work tonight we will both be eating on our own again. The weekend plan had been to visit Debrah's mum in Kent and my parents in Sussex - so that will all have to be re-arranged although I suspect, given the snow in the SE of the UK, we might not have been able to go anyway.

And there is freezing weather forecast for here for the next two days - let's hope that snow isn't sat on that runway still come Sunday lunchtime or I will not be quite so sanguine about the whole thing.